You know when something feels so wrong it’s right? Say hello to the Badly Drawn Ball, an ode to our collective inability to draw a football and the latest release from 12 Pentagons. This is Creative Soccer Culture at its purest.
If you’ve ever tried to draw a football, you’ll know it’s harder than it looks. A circle. Some hexagons. Maybe a few pentagons if you’re brave. And yet, no matter how hard you try, it always looks… wrong. Circles skew, panels collide, and what should be geometry turns into chaos. For Jon-Paul Wheatley and his experimental football brand 12 Pentagons, that chaos became the canvas for their latest release: The Badly Drawn Ball.
Four years of experiments, over 5,000 community submissions, and countless warped sketches later, the idea has been stitched—well, thermo-bonded—into reality. The result? A 50-panel, irregularly constructed football that’s perfectly round yet proudly imperfect. Part performance ball, part art object, and completely unapproved by FIFA, it’s a playful rebellion against design perfectionism and a celebration of human error.
We sat down with Jon-Paul to talk about the spirit of mistakes, the technical nightmare of building a “worse” ball, and why somewhere in the future he hopes an archaeologist digs one up and scratches their head.
You've clearly dedicated a lot of time to this project, so let’s start with the obvious—why on earth make a football that looks like it was drawn badly?
Jon-Paul Wheatley: Honestly, because I thought it’d be funny. It’s harder to make, it looks worse, and it’s been a ridiculous thing to spend four years on. I’ve always been drawn to footballs that feel odd or wrong in some way, including riffs on the classic 32-panel ball. A badly drawn one felt like the ultimate version of that. Millions of these things already exist in sketchbooks and school notebooks, so I thought—why not actually make one?
You received over 5,000 drawing submissions from your audience. How did you decide which “mistakes” made the final cut?
JPW: With that many drawings, you start spotting patterns. Certain errors kept cropping up—pentagons touching, panels stretched and warped, strange angles. I took the most common of these and distilled them into a 3D object. The beauty of it is that from every angle, it looks like a different 2D badly drawn ball. There are almost infinite bad drawings hiding inside this one ball.
“What I loved was that each drawing felt like a little self-contained story. Sometimes you’d forgive a terrible one once you saw it was drawn by a five-year-old. Other times it felt very special.”
What surprised you most about the way people drew a football from memory?
JPW: In all honesty, probably that we didn’t get more willies. We still got plenty, but fewer than expected. What I really loved, though, was that each drawing felt like a little self-contained story. Sometimes you’d forgive a terrible one once you saw it was drawn by a five-year-old. Other times it felt very special—like one submission from an 89-year-old man whose lines all shook and wavered, but underneath he’d written, “Parkinsons.” That collection is now one of my most prized possessions. We’ve used it everywhere: it’s on the packaging, my laptop, and we even made a (very small) pop-up gallery displaying them. It really turned into a community art project.
The ball uses a 50-panel irregular construction—something most people wouldn’t even attempt. What were the biggest technical hurdles in making it work?
JPW: With a standard 32-panel ball, you just match the edges and it works. With this, every change causes a ripple effect through the whole design. It’s like a spherical jigsaw puzzle where each piece only fits in one place. Logistically, it’s a nightmare. It’s way harder than making a standard ball, but that’s part of what makes it interesting.
"It is worse in some ways. It's less aerodynamic, irregular, harder to construct. But if the goal is to make a football that looks like a bad drawing, then it’s perfect."
This is your first thermo-bonded ball. How does the technology both clash with and elevate the “badly drawn” aesthetic?
JPW:I didn’t set out to make a thermo-bonded ball—I just wanted the best version of a badly drawn ball possible. The handmade “red pen” prototype took weeks and was a complete mess. It was totally impractical to produce. Thermo-bonding let us print directly onto the panels, make it rounder, waterproof, and cheaper. For me, it’s not about the technology itself—it’s about using whatever method gets closest to the idea in my head.
Football design is usually about chasing “better”: lighter, rounder, faster. Why was it meaningful to you to create something “worse”?
JPW: It is worse in some ways. It’s less aerodynamic, irregular, harder to construct. But if the goal is to make a football that looks like a bad drawing, then it’s perfect. We’ve built 12 Pentagons to allow for experiments like this. Things that make no commercial sense elsewhere become possible when you’ve got a community willing to join in.
Finally, if someone picks up the Badly Drawn Ball and feels slightly confused by it, what reaction would make you happiest?
JPW: If they pick it up at all with any sense of curiosity, that’s already a win. I like that it’s a curious object. The fact it even exists is puzzling—and that’s what I love. Somewhere down the line, some archaeologist will find one and be baffled.
Shop the Badly Drawn Ball now at 12p.com
